Introducing: GIFCards

This weekend I found myself, in succession:

1. In a depressing, rundown coin shop with sunbleached boxes of forgotten baseball cards, each coated with layers of increasingly-marked down price-tags

2. Purchasing a box of 1989 Sportflics baseball cards for six dollars

3. Opening packs of Sportflics baseball cards in my living room and seeing, in their shiny plastic coating, a reflection of myself.

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For those unaware, Sportflics were an engineering marvel, a golden age of ballooning among the baseball card culture. For the low, low price of 79 cents, nearly double what a pack cost in those days, a kid could rip open a pack to find three whole whopping cards. But these were no ordinary cards. These were cards instilled with Magic Motion: a ridged plastic coating that caused the image of the card to move when you tilted it, theoretically. In reality it just made the picture hard to see most of the time.

Maybe I’m a Sportflic, I thought, ridden with angst, as I pulled a Gregg Jefferies out of a foil wrapper. Here I am still trying to convey thoughts and feelings with words, while the rest of the world is leaving me behind. No one has time to read words anymore; the future will revert to hieroglyphics, sad trumpet noises, animated GIFs and smell-o-vision. My fate is sealed, I thought. Then I looked at the cards again. But why must I martyr myself for the sake of literature, that fickle trollop? Why not join the future, already in progress.

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And so, after relearning Photoshop for the hundredth time, I bring to you the latest in internet baseball pseudo-analysis, combined with the pointless charm of the Sportflic. I bring to you: the GIFCard.

Today’s release, issue #1: Chris Carter, of your (and Mr. Temple’s) Houston Astros.

Collect all 1 and trade with your friends! Which you can’t, because everyone can just download this one. The internet is awful in some ways.